The last American glove-maker

An employee uses a sewing machine to assemble a baseball glove at the Nokona facility in in Nocona, Texas. BLOOMBERG PHOTO

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NOCONA, Texas -- This little brick factory isn't supposed to be here. It should be in the Philippines, or Vietnam, maybe China. Not here, in the heart of Texas.

Baseball gloves, like many other things, aren't really made in America anymore. In the 1960s, production shifted to Asia and never came back. It might be America's favorite pastime, and few things are more personal to baseball-lovers than their first glove -- the smell, the feel, the memory of childhood summers. But most gloves are stitched together thousands of miles away by people who couldn't afford a ticket at Fenway Park.

One company didn't get the memo. Since the Great Depression, Nokona has been making gloves in a small town outside Dallas with a long history of producing boots and whips for cowboys.

Nokona baseball and softball gloves hang on display for sale inside the store at the company's manufacturing facility in Texas. BLOOMBERG PHOTO

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There's a livestock-feed store next door to the factory, which offers $5 tours for visitors who want to see how the "last American ball glove" is made.

You can watch employees weave the webbing by hand, feed the laces through the holes with needles, and pound the pocket into shape with a rounded hammer. The American flag gets stitched into the hide -- and that, they say at Nokona, is more than just a business matter.

"Made in America means you believe in our country," said Carla Yeargin, a glove inspector and tour guide at Nokona, where she worked her way up from janitor. "We have the love for the ballglove, because we made it here."

And the final product could cost you 25 times more than a foreign-made version at the local discount store.

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Yes, that's partly a reflection of the premium nature of the Nokona line but still it represents a huge challenge for the company, as well as for Donald Trump.

"Making it here" is a big deal for the president. Last month President Trump staged a week of events to celebrate U.S. manufacturing, showcasing products from Campbell's soup to Caterpillar construction gear. July 17 was declared "Made in America Day."

"Restoring American manufacturing will not only restore our wealth, it will restore our pride," Trump said.

There's nostalgia -- critics would call it fantasy -- in Trump's rhetoric. He harkens to a time when the U.S. was the world's biggest manufacturer, and Fords rolled off the assembly line into the driveways of upwardly mobile households.

By now, "supply chains have been so heavily outsourced that it's no longer possible to buy American for some products," said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington who studies advances in manufacturing. "The suppliers don't exist. In some instances it's too little, too late."

Nokona refused to follow the herd.

After the Civil War, ranchers drove longhorn cattle through Montague County to livestock markets in the north. The town of Nocona, about 100 miles northwest of Dallas and named after a Comanche chief (hence the Native American logo on Nokona gloves), developed a reputation as a leather-goods hub.

The company's name is spelled with a "k" because the company was told in the 1930s that the town's name couldn't be trademarked. Today, Nocona is home to about 3,000 people and a few stoplights. "God Bless America" banners line the street, and locals wish you a "blessed day."

Founded in 1926, the company originally made wallets and purses. It was a former Rice University baseball player named Roberts Storey who steered Nokona into ballgloves.

The shift to Asia in the 1960s nearly put Nokona out of business. It hasn't been an easy faith to keep. The company went bankrupt in 2010 but continued producing after a Phoenix-based maker of football gloves bought a majority stake. And cracks are starting to show in Nokona's claim to be all-American. It recently started importing partially assembled gloves from China made of Kip leather, a luxury cowhide.

Still, 98 percent of its gloves are made at the factory in Nocona. The nutty scent of leather fills the place. In the lobby, samples of the company's work over the decades are displayed on the wall, from wallets to football pads. When you buy a glove, the cashier Helen -- who's worked there for 55 years -- writes out a receipt by hand.

Making a glove involves about 40 steps and can take four hours. Hides, mostly from Chicago or Milwaukee, are tested for temper and thickness. Workers lower presses onto metal dies to cut the leather. The pieces -- some models require 25 of them -- are sewn together, joining the inner and outer halves. The product is turned right-side-out and shaped on hot steel fingers. A grease used during World War II to clean rifles is lathered under the pocket, to keep it flexible.

The company emphasizes the craft that goes into each glove, and that's reflected in the bill. Rawlings has gloves for all budgets: Its top-end models cost plenty, but you can get a 9-inch children's version for less than $8. Nokona's equivalent-sized mitt costs $220, and its pro model runs to $500.

Nokona ships about 40,000 gloves a year, a fraction of the 6.2 million sold annually in the U.S. It employs about 35 people at the Texas plant. It's also hard to compete with the big brands -- Rawlings, Wilson, Mizuno -- for major league endorsements. Some companies pay players to use their gloves. Nokona has one superstar admirer: Texan legend and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, whose first glove was a Nokona, and who's appeared in the company's ads. But it has only about a dozen current top-level players signed up.